Department
of
ENGLISH
2016/2017
Newsletter
Dear friends,
The year 2015-16 was an academic
whirlwind. Although we did no hiring, we were
kept busy throughout the fall by designing
new courses and modifying existing courses
to participate in the new UB Curriculum, an
entirely redesigned undergraduate General
Education program. English Department faculty
served on key committees designing this new
curriculum, and the entire effort was led by
Andy Stott, Professor of English, Director of
the Honors College, and VP for Undergraduate
Education. In the coming year, we will be teaching 10 new UB Seminars (small
interactive courses required for incoming students), 2 UB Transfer-Seminars,
and we have designed 3 new interdisciplinary lecture/discussion section
courses to be offered in the new Pathway system: Literature and Technology,
Literature and War, and Literature and Nature. In all we developed or revised
a staggering 25 new courses to fit the new curriculum. For the full array of
courses being offered, check out the latest Whole English Catalogue of course
descriptions—a publication which still disappears like hot cakes as soon as
the inimitable Nicole Lazaro (secretary for undergraduate studies) makes
it available. http://www.buffalo.edu/cas/english/undergraduate-programs/
courses.html.
As described in our Special Edition newsletter issue in the spring, the
Poetics Program had a year of 25th anniversary celebratory events, beginning
with two symposia on translation and transliteration of international literatures,
and culminating with the extremely well-attended first annual Robert Creeley
Lecture and Celebration of Poetry and a two-day conference, “Poetics:
(The Next) 25 Years.” It was a joy to see so many of you there! Please join us
this coming March 30 for the second annual Creeley Lecture, featuring an
address by Jerome McGann, the John Stewart Bryan Professor at the
University of Virginia, and music by UB’s SUNY Distinguished Professor in
Music, David Felder, composed to two Creeley poems. From an anonymous
donor, this lectureship has received an initial endowment; to contribute to
making it adequate to meeting the annual costs of this celebration, go to www.
giving.buffalo.edu/creeley. Check our Facebook and webpage for updated
information on these events in March.
2015-16 also initiated the “Bvffalo Bard 2016: 400 Years Since
Shakespeare” year-long celebration, also described in our spring Special
Edition. For highlights of the coming fall, see page 5.
The English Department also received the pledge of a generous
endowment from Mark Hass, as described on page 9.
Faculty were extraordinarily prolific in publishing this year: 7 faculty
authored or edited twelve books. In 2016-17, three of these faculty will go
forward for promotion, in addition to three others who have books forthcoming.
Such productivity and (anticipated) promotion is a clear sign of the vitality of
the department.
On a soberer note, we were deeply saddened this year by the death
of Dennis Tedlock, SUNY Distinguished Professor & James H. McNulty
Professor in English, and of three emeriti faculty: George Levine, Bill Sylvester,
and Mark Shechner. We appreciate your many expressions of appreciation
for these gifted teachers, administrators, and writers. See pages 14-15 for
memorial tributes.
Finally, I am delighted at the increasing number of you who are staying in
touch with us through notes on your activities or achievements (see pages
11-13). A simple list of the vast array of kinds of work you do, the numbers and
diversity of your publications, and the fascinating, often circuitous life paths
you have followed would convince any skeptic that an English major at UB (or
an MA or PhD) provides a gateway to a rich life of discovery and productivity
across a large number of fields. We hope you keep returning to see us and
staying in touch. The pages that follow announce only a few of the highlights of
the year to come. We hope to see you at some of them!
Cordially,
Cristanne Miller
Many generous alums designate their annual University giving to the English Department. We are grateful for their donations, which support student tuition,
student research projects, dissertation and travel fellowships for graduate students, and English Department programs.
What's on our wish list right now?
• Funds to support graduate student research and dissertation writing. The department has come to the end of a 5-year dissertation-fellowship
gift; we would like to replace it to continue funding an exceptional student in his or her final year of work on the dissertation.
• Funds to support undergraduate education through small achievement awards, trips to performances, technologically enhanced classrooms,
special opportunity workshops
• Funds to support our membership in the Folger Library Shakespeare Consortium
How to Make a Gift:
If you would like to support the Department, you can designate the English Department when responding to any of the University fund-raising efforts. You can
also send a check payable to UB Foundation, Inc., indicating “Department of English” on the memo line. Checks should be sent to Cindy Johannes, University
at Buffalo Foundation, PO Box 730, Buffalo, NY 14226-0730, phone: 716-645-8720. Or you can donate through the English Department’s website:
http://www.buffalo.edu/cas/english.html by clicking on “Giving to UB.”
We appreciate all donations – from the smallest to the largest amounts. Since there are over 7,500 English alums, $10 and $25 gifts do add up.
Thank you for your support and continued interest in UB’s Department of English!
In This Issue:
Current Trends; Featured Faculty........................... 2
Faculty News...................................................... 3, 4
Department News................................................... 5
Program Director Notes.......................................... 6
Graduation Ceremony May 2016........................... 7
Undergraduate Student News............................ 8, 9
Graduate Student News....................................... 10
Featured Alumnus/Alumni/ae News......................11
Alumni/ae News.............................................. 12, 13
Emeriti; In Memoriam........................................... 14
In Memoriam......................................................... 15
Upcoming Events................................................. 16
Current Trends
professionalization: studying classic texts, we hear, does not speak to an
increasingly career-oriented student body or their tuition-paying parents. . . .
But . . . could it be that in this so-called information economy, the basic
skills of incisive reading and effective writing prove to be tremendously marketable skills? Despite the argument that degrees in the Humanities don’t train
students for the job market, civic and professional activity in the 21st century
would seem to require the ability to navigate a landscape of texts. Success in
this environment—whether it involves interpreting market analyses, seeking
capital investment for a new technology, or mediating a relationship between
management and labor—can only be assisted by knowing how texts work:
how they are produced, how they are distributed, and how they are consumed.
If our current students are likely to become “content providers” and “information managers” and “knowledge workers,” aren’t the Humanities, attentive to
aesthetic questions of presentation, persuasion, and affect as well as political
questions of reason, emotion and power, teaching very marketable skills?
In other words, the marketable lesson I picked up from Critical Theory was
this: reading and writing will be crucial to your success in whatever you do.
They are both difficult. Get good at them. . . .
Teaching in an English department has given me the chance to explore this
problem more directly. I don’t mean to suggest that the Humanities are simply
more stylish than other fields (though I have begun to wonder if I have the
right wardrobe for an English professor). But I do get a certain perverse satisfaction when I remember that I learned how to write while slogging through
what is occasionally called the worst writing of the past century – when a
visiting professor told me that I didn’t have any style.
An Education in Style
by Chad Lavin
Like many people, when I first enrolled in college, I was
encouraged to make the most of this precious time by immediately committing myself to a marketable degree. I resisted
that advice, however, and soon enough I found myself in a
Political Science class called “Critical Theory” that, in spite of
its title, offered what ended up providing the most marketable
lesson I got in college.
This was ironic because the class focused on the works
of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, philosophers who,
in what is now famous for being some of the most impenetrable (many just
say “bad”) writing of the 20th century, warned against the idea that knowledge
should be directed toward some instrumental end. So what was the marketable lesson I got in this class?
Midway through the semester some classmates and I went to office hours
and goaded our professor, a visiting scholar from the UK, into speaking openly
about how she found American students. After a bit of hedging, she replied
that our writing was, in a word, “appalling”; while a handful of us in the class
could write functionally, “Nobody in this room has any style whatsoever.”
Style? My writing was supposed to have style? . . .
This conversation stuck with me as I took all of the other political theory
courses available. . . . I eventually earned a BA in Political Science, quickly
followed by an MA and a PhD. I then wrote two books with the word “politics”
in the titles, and earned tenure in Political Science. Clearly, I’d found a marketable degree (or three). But something wasn’t right. What wasn’t right was my
style.
Political theory, you see, is quite marginalized in most Political Science
departments. The argument for this marginalization typically reduces to
Chad Lavin is the author of The Politics of Responsibility and Eating Anxiety: The Perils of Food Politics. Trained in Political Science, he is happy to be
making a home in the English department.
Featured Faculty - Carla Mazzio
Associate Chair of English, Stacy Hubbard, sat down with Associate
Professor Carla Mazzio to find out more about her background and her
teaching and research interests.
play before casting parts. So the hilarity of the miscasting,
itself perfect for Shakespearean comedy, contributed to
my sheer joy at this early theatrical experience. I wanted
to be on stage. I wanted to be a comedian. I loved that
sense of timing and audience engagement. And so there
you have it: teaching. And teaching Shakespeare. Those
who can’t do stand up, sit down and write, and, of course,
profess.
SH: Tell us about your background--where you grew up, where you went
to school, why you chose to join the faculty at Buffalo.
CM: I’m Irish Italian, a classic combination from the Boston area. I did my
undergrad at Barnard College and my graduate work at Harvard and then
taught at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago. Along the
way I realized how much the mission of the public university resonated with
me. UB English, one of the top departments in the country from my
perspective, represents a combination of scholarly brilliance, creativity and
innovation, a genuine commitment to scholarship, teaching and intellectual
exchange. But it’s also the combination of humor and humility among my students and colleagues in and well beyond the English Department that makes
teaching here such a deep pleasure.
SH: You have opened up the field of Renaissance literature and science
in new ways with your edited volumes (such as The Body in Parts and
Shakespeare & Science) and other publications over the years. How did
you get interested in the history of science?
CM: My work on the history of speech led me directly into the history of
medicine, and more specifically, our historical understanding of the body. In
fact, I wrote an entire essay on “the tongue” for The Body in Parts, a volume in
which each contributor wrote an essay on the history and culture of a different
body part. Currently I’m engaged in investigations of literature in light of early
natural history, meteorology, and most recently, mathematics.
SH: Your current book project is about mathematics, yes?
CM: That’s right. “The Trouble with Numbers: The Drama of Mathematics in
the Age of Shakespeare” started with the simple observation that “numbers”
meant both poetry and quantitative units, suggesting that literature intersected
with the history of calculation --such as arithmetic, geometry, and accounting—in curious ways. My book shows how dramatic shifts and controversies
within an emerging understanding of mathematics, in late sixteenth-century
England in particular, served as a stimulus for some central tensions, plots
and subplots within Renaissance drama.
SH: Your award winning book, The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language
Trouble in an Age of Eloquence, challenged longstanding assumptions
about the literature and culture of early modern England. Tell us about
that.
CM: I began the project by wondering about the history of inarticulacy--about
what it might have meant to feel inarticulate, particularly in a period so long
understood as the “age of eloquence,” the Renaissance. As English emerged
in the sixteenth-century as a language capable of representing new forms of
collective identity, from “common prayer” in the wake of the Reformation to fictions of national unity under Elizabeth I, a plethora of inarticulate “others” also
emerged who might then bear the burden of the inarticulate, the exiled, the
willfully unheard. My concern for those who felt shame and self-consciousness
about self-expression ranged from the socially marginalized (by gender, rank,
region, dialect, ethnicity, etc.) to the elite male subject at the center of the
“Renaissance” or rebirth of rhetoric and eloquence. By exploring this history I
understood that drama drew upon the limits as well as the possibilities of humanist eloquence and common speech in a way that that gave the inarticulate
a place to be heard anew.
SH: As an award-winning teacher, how do you get today’s students
interested in Shakespeare?
CM: I find that I first have to start my lecture courses by aiming to dismantle
some preconceived ideas of Shakespeare’s “greatness.” It is important to
allow students to encounter the plays and poems anew, relieved of the burden
of “the” bard’s exceptional status. Additionally, Shakespeare is all the more
alive in and as performance in the digital age and students bring with them a
great deal of digital and visual literacy, which can lead to vigorous discussion
and a great deal of fun.
SH: How did you you get interested in the Renaissance?
CM: I was miscast as a short character (I am tall) in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in high school. Apparently, the teacher had not reread the
For a longer version of this interview, go to www.english.buffalo.edu
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Faculty News
PUBLICATIONS & EXHIBITS
Elizabeth Mazzolini, Assistant
Professor, published The Everest
Effect: Nature, Culture, Ideology
(U of Alabama Press, 2015)
Steve McCaffery, David Gray Chair
of Poetry and Letters, and Professor,
published Parsifal (Roof Books, 2016) and
Dark Ladies (Chax, 2016)
Randy Schiff, Associate Professor,
co-edited with Joseph Taylor, The
Politics of Ecology: Land, Life, and
Law in Medieval Britain (Ohio State
University Press, 2016).
Cristanne Miller, SUNY Distinguished Professor,
edited Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them
(Harvard University Belknap Press, 2016); Dickinson
In Her Own Time, co-edited with Jane Eberwein and
Stephanie Farrar (University of Iowa Press, December
2015); her Emily Dickinson: A Celebration for Readers
co-edited with Suzanne Juhasz (Gordon and Breach,
1989) was reissued by Routledge, 2016.
David Schmid, Associate Professor, co-authored
Zombie Talk: Culture, History, Politics (Palgrave, 2015)
and edited Violence in American Popular Culture (2
vols; Praeger, 2015)
William Solomon, Associate
Professor, published Slapstick
Modernism: Chaplin to Kerouac
to Iggy Pop (University of Illinois,
2016)
Bruce Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor, had 2 solo photography exhibits and released a 2-CD set with notes &
transcriptions, based on his recordings: J. B. Smith: No More Good Time in the World for Me
Congratulations to Nnedi Okorafor, whose novella Binti won
the Nebula and the Hugo Awards for Best Novella
Nnedi also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for The Book
of Phoenix, and the Children’s Africana Book Award for
The Chicken in the Kitchen.
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Faculty News
AWARDS
Rachel Ablow, Associate Professor, received a SUNY Conversations in the Disciplines Award
Dave Alff, Assistant Professor, was awarded an NEH Summer Stipend (Summer 2016)
Diane Christian, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor and Bruce Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor, received the UB Alumni Association
Walter B. Cooke Award, for non-alumni/ae notable meritorious contributions to the university
Bruce Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor, received a Robert & Patricia Colby Foundation Grant; he was also named Co-director of the UB Creative
Arts Initiative.
Christina Milletti received a Mable House Project Residency (2016); with the Department of Media Study, she secured a WBFO Visiting Artist Proposal to
bring Shelley Jackson to UB for 7 weeks in 2015-16
RECOGNITIONS
Bruce Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor, was named “Best Columnist” in this year’s Buffalo Spree Best of WNY competition. The citation read:
“Raconteur and provocateur Bruce Jackson is a SUNY Distinguished Professor, documentary filmmaker, author, and photographer. Jackson also writes
occasional columns for Buffalo alternative weekly The Public; his topics include local political lunacy, national politics, death row inmates, the Attica
Correctional Facility riots of 1971, education, race relations, terrorism, and more. His style is precise, intense, and—rare for academics—crystal clear.”
Andy Stott, Dean of Undergraduate Education and Director of the Honors College, was named one of thirty-three American Council on Education
Fellows nationwide for 2016-2017. Since 1965, more than 1,800 vice presidents, deans, department chairs, faculty, and other emerging leaders have
participated in the ACE Fellows Program, a customized learning experience that enables participants to immerse themselves in the culture, policies, and
decision-making processes of another institution. Andy will spend the coming year working with the leadership at Ohio State University.
Nikolaus Wasmoen, Postdoctoral Fellow, was selected for a Commendation for an Outstanding Dissertation at the University of Rochester, where he
received his degree this spring. In 2016-17, he will continue at UB as a postdoc in English and Digital Humanities.
Barbara Bono awarded Meyerson Award
We are delighted to announce that Professor Barbara Bono has been awarded the prestigious UB President Emeritus and
Mrs. Meyerson Award for Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching and Mentoring. This award was established to recognize
exceptional teaching at the University. Professor Bono is in her fortieth year as an English Professor, and her thirty-second
year of teaching at UB. A specialist in the literature of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, she is the author of Literary
Transvaluation: From Vergilian Epic to Shakespearean Tragicomedy, and numerous articles. She has just finished a six-year
term as Academic Director of the UB Civic Engagement Academy. She has also just finished her fourth year convening an
undergraduate weekly non-credit Shakespeare Reading Group. She continues as the Department’s representative to the
famous Folger Shakespeare Institute in Washington, D.C.
Professor Bono regularly teaches both undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Shakespeare and film,
and Shakespeare pedagogy. She is one of the most popular teachers in the department: her large lectures on Shakespeare regularly fill to capacity.
She estimates that she has taught some 8,000 students over the course of her career—both graduate and undergraduate. Thanks to her tireless
energy, her wealth of knowledge, and her extraordinary commitment to pedagogy, whole generations of UB students have learned to appreciate and
enjoy the work of William Shakespeare and the early modern period.
Professor Bono is also the principal organizer of “Bvffalo Bard 2016: 400 Years Since Shakespeare,” a year-long, region-wide series of public
humanities events, including the 2016 UB Humanities Institute Conference, “Object and Adaptation: The Worlds of Shakespeare and Cervantes.” For
more information on the conference, go to https://buffalobard.wordpress.com.
Dickens Universe
Once again, the English Department sent two PhD candidates to the Dickens Universe, a week-long intensive seminar at the University
of California, Santa Cruz. Graduate-student participants from all over the world come together at the “Universe” to hear talks from some
of the leading scholars in the field of Victorian studies and to participate in discussions led by those scholars. Every year the “Universe”
chooses one novel around which the events are organized. This year’s novel was Dombey and Son, one of the most popular and complex
of Dickens’s works. The two students who attended, Sarah Goldbort and Allison Cardon, are both going into their third year of the program.
Both intend to work in Victorian studies. According to Sarah, “the Dickens Universe provided an invaluable opportunity for furthering my
research interests, networking with fellow scholars, and gaining insights about publishing and the job market. Not only was it productive,
but it was a truly unique and fun opportunity to learn about Victorian literature and culture.”
Mack, Mazzolini, and Milletti awarded HI Fellowships
Ruth Mack, Elizabeth Mazzolini, and Christina Milletti have been awarded Humanities Institute Fellowships for 2016-2017. In addition, Mazzolini has also
been named an OVPRED/HI Fellow.
•Ruth Mack, Associate Professor
•Elizabeth Mazzolini, Assistant Professor
•Christina Milletti, Associate Professor
“Habitual Knowledge: Theory and the Everyday in “Environmentalism Without Guilt”
“Room in Hotel America”, a novel
Enlightenment Britain”
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Department News
The UB English Department has entered into a new collaboration with riverrun, a local foundation supporting academic and community
partnerships in the arts and humanities. This is the inaugural year of a film series, which will focus each year on the film of a different
country or region, with particular interest in films newly released and not yet distributed in the U.S.
The riverrun Global Film Series
September 29-October 1 - Country in Focus 2016: Iran
Burchfield Penney Art Center, 1300 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo • 2016 Curator: Tanya Shilina-Conte
Thursday, September 29:
7:00-10:00
Downpour (1972; 2 h 6 m), Bahram Beyzaie. Restored in 2011 by the
World Cinema Foundation at Cineteca di Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata, in
collaboration with Bahram Beyzaie.
Introduced by Bruce Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor and James
Agee Professor of American Culture, Department of English, UB
Saturday, October 1: (continued)
Animation Shorts (1970-2011; 1 h 6 m), Noureddin Zarrinkelk.
Duty, First, 1970
A Playground for Baboush, 1971
Association of Ideas, 1973
The Mad, Mad, Mad World, 1975
A Way to Neighbor, 1978
One, Two, Three, More… 1980
Super Powers, 1982
Identity, 1993
Pood (Persian Carpet), 2000
Bani Adam (Excellencies), 2011
Followed by a conversation with animator and graphic illustrator Noureddin
Zarrinkelk
Friday, September 30:
2:00-4:30
Remote Control (2015; 47 m), Anonymous
Hair (2016; 1 h 18 m), Mahmoud Ghaffari. Courtesy of Mahmoud Ghaffari.
Introduced by Nadia Shahram, Western New York Activist and Adjunct
Faculty, Law School, UB
5:00-7:00
Tenant (2015; 20 m), Mohsen Makhmalbaf.
316 (2014; 1 h 12 m), Payman Haghani
Introduced by Laurence Shine, Lecturer at Buffalo State College, 2016 NY
State Chancellor’s Award in Teaching
7:00-8:15
Public Lecture: “Rising from the Ashes: Iranian Art House Cinema,” Hamid
Naficy, Scholar of Iranian cinema, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani
Professor in Communication, Northwestern University
8:30-10:30
Tales (2014; 1h 28 m), Rakhshan Bani-Etemad
Followed by a conversation and book signing with Hamid Naficy
*Film Future
8:00-10:00
Notes on Blindness: A VR Journey Into the World Beyond Sight, trailer
(2 m)
Notes on Blindness, Peter Middleton and James Spinney (2016; 1 h 30 m)
Introduced by M. Faust, The Public
Saturday, October 1:
2:00-4:30
Roads of Kiarostami (2005; 34 m), Abbas Kiarostami.
The riverrun Global Film Series is produced by riverrun, with support from the UB Departments of English and Media Study, Buffalo State English, James Agee Chair in American
Culture, SUNY Distinguished Professor Bruce Jackson, and an Action Grant from the New York Council for the Humanities. Advisory and coordinating board: UB Lecturer Dr. Tanya
Shilina-Conte, UB SUNY Distinguished Professor Cristanne Miller, UB Associate Professor William Solomon, President of riverrun Patrick Martin, and Buffalo State Lecturer Laurence Shine. For more information, contact the 2016 Curator Tanya Shilina-Conte, [email protected], or Assist. Director Ajitpaul Mangat, [email protected].
Bvffalo Bard 2016: 400 Years Since Shakespeare
In continuing celebration of the Shakespeare commemorative year locally represented by “Bvffalo Bard 2016: 400 Years Since Shakespeare,” the UB
Libraries and the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library are staging an unprecedented “Wedding of the Folios” that brings together all eight of Buffalo’s
exceedingly rare and valuable 17th-century Shakespeare Folios (1623, 1632, 1663, 1685)—the four held by UB and the four held by the B&ECPL. This
“marriage,” which will take place on the steps and in the exhibit cases of the B&ECPL on Tuesday, October 4th at 10 am, will then be celebrated at a
“Shakespeare Jubilee,” featuring special tours and sample performances, on Thursday, October 13th from 5-7 pm. The combined exhibit will remain up
for the duration of the calendar year. The “Wedding,” the “Jubilee,” and the exhibit, are free and open to the public.
The “Shakespeare Jubilee” (Oct. 13) will be hosted by UB’s Andrew McConnell Stott, Professor of English and Dean of the Honors College/Vice
Provost for Undergraduate Education, a theater historian whose forthcoming book is on David Garrick, and will include performances by students from
Peace of the City’s “Shakespeare Comes to (716),” an after-school theatre troupe for at-risk youth, and UB’s Department of Theatre and Dance.
Other free or nominally-priced major Shakespeare or Renaissance-themed events during fall 2016 include:
22-24 September: “Renaissance Remix,” the Buffalo Humanities Festival, https://buffalohumanities.org/
13-14 October: tion.com/
“Object and Adaptation: The Worlds of Shakespeare and Cervantes,” a Humanitities Institute conference https://objectandadapta-
13-17 October:
The Macbeth Insurgency, drama, Niagara University, http://theatre.niagara.edu/
27 Oct.-6 Nov.:
Return to the Forbidden Planet, musical adaptation, UB Center for the Arts
16-20 November: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, drama, UB Center for the Arts
For more information, see also https://buffalobard.wordpress.com/.
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Program Director Notes
Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture
During the 2015-2016 academic year, the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture (CSPC) successfully increased collaborations among faculty
and students from a range of disciplines. The Center’s core working group now consists of affiliates from English, Comparative Literature, Romance Languages
and Literatures, Music, and Transnational Studies. We initiated two new lecture series: one is entitled “Psychoanalysis, Literature, and the Arts”; the other is
dedicated to exploring clinical dimensions of psychoanalytic practice. Within the framework of these series, we hosted speakers who each offered both public
lectures and seminars. All of our events were well attended and enthusiastically received. In addition, we co-sponsored lectures and conferences both in English
and other departments; we launched a new graduate reading group and a dissertation-writing group.
This coming year we will publish the first number of a new online journal, provisionally titled Psychoanalysis and Modernity. The journal will be designed and
edited collaboratively at UB by the faculty and students of the CSPC but it will feature an advisory board of prominent international scholars in the field of psychoanalytic studies. Each issue will revolve around a theme determined by the editorial board. The inaugural issue, on “The Untimely,” will appear in fall 2017.
In addition, we are offering an exciting series of lectures and seminars, both in the fall and the spring. In late September, Anna Kornbluh (University of Illinois,
Chicago), author of Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham, 2013), will lead a seminar on “political psychoanalysis”; in
early October, Elissa Marder (Emory University), author of The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Fordham, 2013), will give a lecture on “Femininity, Fixation, and Photography”; in March, Aaron Schuster (University of Chicago), author of The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (MIT, 2016),
will offer a mini-seminar; and, in April, we are excited to host the Israeli psychoanalyst and visual artist Bracha Ettinger, author of The Matrixial Borderspace
(Minnesota, 2006), who will give a lecture and a seminar on her work.
- Ewa Plonowska Ziarek
Executive Director, Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture
http://www.buffalo.edu/cas/english/graduate/psychoanalysis.html
- Steven Miller
Director, Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture
SAVE THE DATES
Sept. 26, 12:30pm - Anna Kombluh (U of Illinois, Chicago) “Political Psychoanalysis” - 638 Clemens
Sept. 27, 4:00pm - Anna Kombluh (U of Illinois, Chicago) “Synchronizing Wuthering Heights, Circa 1848” - 1032 Clemens
Oct.5, 5:30pm - Elissa Marder (Emory U) “Knock Knock: Femininity, Fixation, and Photography”- 306 Clemens
Oct. 6, 12:30pm - Elissa Marder (Emory U) “Fixation: Freud’s Counter-Concept” - 1032 Clemens
March (date & time TBA) - Aaron Schuster (Univ. of Chicago) mini seminar
April (date & time TBA) - Bracha Ettinger - Israeli psychoanalyst - lecture & seminar
Poetics Program
In April 2016, the Poetics Program observed its 25th anniversary by hosting several interrelated events. One of these events, a conference titled, “Poetics:
(The Next) 25 Years” activated multiple sites of inquiry, and the Poetics Program will translate these questions and considerations into its series of readings,
talks, seminar visits, and curatorial projects this year. Our fall schedule includes Aja Couchois Duncan, an educator and writer of Ojibwe, French and Scottish
descent. Her work has been anthologized in Biting the Error: Writers. Western NY Book Arts Center, 468 Washington St., Buffalo. For more details on Fall 2016
Poetics events, please visit: https://www.buffalo.edu/cas/english/news.../poetics-plus.html
In the spring, the Poetics Program welcomes Jerome McGann as the next speaker in the Robert Creeley Lecture in Poetry and Poetics series. We also
welcome the opportunity to again run a Buffalo city-wide poetry contest encouraging students to engage with poetry and art in the broadest sense.
And a final note: I’m delighted to announce that we now have a Poetics Program Library! This will be a crucial space not only for building the Poetics community but for creating a context for all those interested in making/reading/thinking poetry and poetics to gather. There will be an Open House for the Poetics
Program Library (404 Clemens) on Thursday, September 15, 5:00-6:30pm. Everyone is cordially invited.
- Myung Mi Kim
Director, Poetics Program
http://www.buffalo.edu/cas/english/news-events/upcoming_events/poetics-plus.html
Do you remember the 1960s (or wish you did)?
Join us for a panel discussion on Arts and Literature at UB During the Sixties
Saturday, Oct. 8, in the newly remodeled Silverman Library, Capen Hall, North Campus,
as part of UB Homecoming and the 1960s Reunion Weekend.
We’ll start at 10:30 with a continental breakfast, and images and sounds of the 1960s (you can test
yourself on how many songs and groups you can name). Brunch will be followed at 11:00 by a panel discussion with Associate Professor of Music Jonathan Golove, Associate Professor of Visual Studies Jonathan Katz, Associate Professor of English William Solomon and Edward H. Butler Professor of Literature
Cristanne Miller. This panel will talk about the 1960s “greats” who were at UB, including Allen Ginsberg and other “beats,” John Barth, and John Cage.
Learn more and register for this free event online: www.buffalo.edu/alumni/events/homecoming
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Graduation Ceremony May 2016
English Department Commencement Ceremony
The English Department Commencement
Ceremony took place on Friday, May 13, 2016 in
Clemens 306, 11:00-1:00. Steven Miller, Associate Professor and Director of the Undergraduate
Program, Barbara Bono, Associate Professor
and recent recipient of the Meyerson Award,
Elizabeth Mazzolini, Assistant Professor, and
Amanda Kelly, graduating senior, addressed the
seniors and their families.
The following is an excerpt from Professor
Mazzolini’s address. The full text can be found on
the English Department web site.
“Hello everyone, I’m honored to be here today celebrating your accomplishments and this milestone with you and your families. . . .
[You have a] highly developed narrative capacity. You have amassed a
storehouse of narrative knowledge and interpretive skill and the ability
to articulate all of it in writing and speech, all of which is
far more than most people have who live amidst all that
same roiling scary and disappointing stuff. Humans lie to
themselves because life is made of stories, and some people
are more in control of those stories than others. Through your
studies in English, you have encountered, experimented with,
lived other lives, other modes of being, other possibilities for
existence. You have lived in the heads of countless characters
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and personas, perhaps adopting some of them experimentally in your writing,
perhaps examining them from a clinical distance. And speaking of writing, ah,
your writing experience, no matter what it was—academic papers, short stories,
poems, experimental essays, professional memos, literary analyses—has given
you the ability to render, to concretize, contingency, possibility, change and
the endless stream of shifting modalities of existence that puzzle and trouble
everyone all the time.
Today’s college graduates, in no matter what field, are expected to change
careers (not just jobs) something like 8 times before retirement. (Yes, you will
retire someday! Remember, time keeps going.) The changes will roll toward
you steadily, and you will meet them with the tools of narrative, analytic, and
interpretive response. You are more ready to greet the world of stories than
almost anyone else. So here’s the advice portion of this graduation speech: Go
forth!, knowing you already are the change in the world, to paraphrase a popular
bumper sticker. Don’t forget to keep vigilant for the truest stories to tell yourself,
and don’t forget to plan for time and space marching onward, and don’t be afraid
to apply a little elbow grease to make situations—yours and
others—better and more joyful in the long haul. Most of all, see
if you can recognize the story in everything; stories may or may
not make you rich or famous, but, with a lot of elbow grease,
they have the infinite capacity to make you and others happy.
Congratulations again, and it’s time to get to work.”
For the full version of this interview,
go to www.english.buffalo.edu
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Undergraduate Student News
Congratulations to the English Department Award Winners:
Michael Fiorica won a David Boren Undergraduate Scholarship (Swahili)
The Arthur Axlerod Memorial Award: Alex Pennington and Kendall Spaulding. Honorable Mention: Hannah McGovern.
Satya Srinivas Ramanujam Gundu, an English-Economics
double-major who has been very active in English department activities, won The George Knight Houpt Prize,
The John Logan Prize, and The Kogut Brothers of New
York Mills Economic Development Award. He was also a
College Ambassador. He will be going into the military before
applying to CS or Applied Mathematics graduate programs.
The Scribbler’s Prize: Lisa Lu. Honorable Mention: Ellen Lutnick
The English Department Essay Contest: Cassidy Sulaiman. Honorable Mention: Michael Fiorica.
The Joyce Carol Oates Prize: Ruby Anderson. Honorable mentions: Amanda
Kelly and Kristina Marie Darling
The Albert Cook Prize, The Mac Hammond Prize, and the John Logan Prize:
W. Dustin Parrott, and Rebekah White. Honorable Mentions: Alexander Blum,
Conor Patrick Clarke,` Christopher Krysztofowicz and Delmarie Lewis.
Kayleigh Reed won a David Boren Undergraduate Scholarship (Urdu) and a
Critical Languages Scholarship; she also served as a college ambassador.
The Creative Non-Fiction Prize: Ruby Anderson. Runners-up: Nathan
LeClaire and Catherine Veiders
Liam Saiia (Philosophy, English) served as a college ambassador.
From the University Libraries:
Max Crinnin won the 2016 English Department Outstanding Senior Award. He also received a SUNY Chancellor’s
Award and was named a Western New York Prosperity
Fellow. An Honors College student, he was the Arts Editor
for The Spectrum and has worked as the student sustainability coordinator for Campus Dining & Shops. “My Wife, My
Mistress: Chekhov’s Literary Lessons in the Art of Medicine”
is the title of Max’s honors thesis. In previous years, he won
the John Logan Prize for poetry (2014), the Academy of American
Poets Prize (2015), and the Western New York Prosperity Fellowship
(2015), among others. For the coming year, Max will work at Evergreen
Health Services, before applying to medical school.
Brian Windschitl - winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize. Honorable Mention: Shayna Israel
Hannah McGovern - winner of the Friends of the University Libraries Prize.
Honorable Mention: Tom Dreitlein
Kristina Marie Darling - winner of The Dan Lilberthson Poetry Prize.
Journalism Awards
Spectrum Photo Editor Kainan Guo won a photojournalism award at the
College Media Association conference in NYC, spring 2016.
Sara DiNatale won the Associated Collegiate Press Reporter of the Year
(second place); she also received the Associated Collegiate Press Investigative Story of the Year Award (first place)
Emma Janicki – Associate Collegiate Press (second place) Best General
News Story
Owen O’Brien received third place in the Associated Collegiate Press Best
Sports Investigative Story category
Spectrum Staff won the Pinnacle Award for the Best Special Section from
the College Media Association.
Kainan Guo, Gabriela Julia, and Marlena Tuskes won the 6th annual
Rosalind Jarrett Sepulveda Journalism Education Awards.
Phi Beta Kappa (FBK) inductees:
Alexandria Rowen
Edward Spangenthal
Anthony Yan
Satya Srinivas Ramanujam Gundu
List of Sigma Tau Delta (STD) inductees:
Sophie Bonk
Alexandria Rowen
Sushmita Gelda
Megan Urbach
Ashley Gielow
Margaret Wilhelm
Kayla Menes
Featured Undergraduate Students:
Ruby Anderson
Lisa Gagnon
Buffalo native and UB senior Lisa Gagnon is one
of three English majors to receive a Western New
York Prosperity Fellowship this year. The fellowship,
which promotes the economic development of WNY,
allowed Lisa to intern at the Just Buffalo Literary
Center this past summer and will support her writing
of a senior thesis about local organizations using
the arts to positively affect the city and region. In
addition to her English studies, Lisa is also studying
Linguistics and Music Performance. Lisa has been
thrilled with the professors, classes and opportunities she’s had here so far. An Honors College Provost Scholar and Phi Beta
Kappa member, Lisa has been a contributor to and editor of NAME literary
magazine and is working with professor Barbara Bono on “Bvffalo Bard:
400 Years Since Shakespeare,” a year-long, region-wide celebration of
Shakespeare’s life and legacy. Lisa has also played cello in the UB Symphony Orchestra and two UB theatre productions and works as a writer for
the School of Architecture and Planning.
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Ruby Anderson, an English and Psychology major, also received a Western New York
Prosperity Fellowship, with which she plans to
promote literacy education through Englishbased mentorship programs. Ruby, who is
from Westchester, NY, chose UB for its nursing
program but was quickly drawn into the English
Department. Thanks to support from a few
special teachers, especially Associate Professor Dimitri Anastasopoulos and Graduate T.A.
Joseph Hall, Ruby committed to writing and was awarded both the Joyce
Carol Oates Fiction Prize and the Creative Non-Fiction Prize. She is currently a psycho-physiology research assistant and marketing representative at Lake Shore Behavioral Health, an expansive WNY mental health
and addiction service. Ruby is pursuing clinical psychology and intends
to work with youth through their struggles with trauma, eating disorders
and depression.
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Undergraduate Student News
Journalism Program: winter study abroad trip to Berlin
For the second consecutive year, the UB journalism program offered a winter study abroad trip to Berlin, which gave students a chance to learn first-hand
what it’s like to be a foreign correspondent. Students learned on-the-ground reporting, met with seven journalists and editors working in Berlin, and each
selected a topic and produced two pieces of original journalism, some of which appeared in UB’s award-winning student newspaper, The Spectrum.
Part of the goal of the winter program is to give students an understanding of a city’s history and of the importance of knowing that history when reporting
on a topic. In learning to be more informed news producers, they also learn to question their own habits of news consumption. This year, with a U.S. presidential race looming, terrorism fears growing, and right-wing parties on the rise in Europe, classes focused on where information comes from, what biases
influence news reports, and what information and perspectives get left out and why.
Berlin offers a remarkable background to discuss 20th-century history and the role of Germany in Europe and the world today. Students spent the first
week learning about Berlin, thinking about possible topics and walking and biking through 20th-century landmarks such as the Brandenburg Gate, Unter
der Linden, the former Nazi headquarters, Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, the site of the Hitler bunker, the Reichstag, the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint
Charlie, and the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe. They also saw the contemporary buildings and initiatives that have blossomed since Berlin
became the German capital again in 1999.
This year the program focused, in particular, on the role of refugees in Europe. January marked the height of the European refugee crisis -- the largest
migration since World War II -- and Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel distinguished herself among European leaders by insisting that Germany
maintain an open-door policy. The evidence of that choice, which resulted in the acceptance of close to 1 million refugees, was noticeable on the streets of
Berlin, in our talks with reporters, and even in our youth hostel, where 16 Syrian refugees were housed, including two young families with children.
The students interviewed these refugees and heard about their reasons for fleeing Syria, the dangers they encountered on small, overcrowded rafts, and
how the refugees walked from Greece to Germany. Most of the Syrians had never met any Americans before and only some spoke English. Most of the
students had never been abroad before, none had ever met a refugee, and all only vaguely knew about the refugee crisis before arriving.
The encounters debunked stereotypes the Syrians had about Americans and the students had about Syrians and left everyone changed, including the
young Syrian children, who gleefully tasted their first M&Ms from the bag one American students had brought with her.
LINKS:
Main Syrian story:
http://www.ubspectrum.com/article/2016/07/german-woman-tries-to-ease-path-for-refugees-in-europes-biggest-immigration-crisis-since-world-war-ii
Cathleen Draper artist story:
http://www.ubspectrum.com/article/2016/07/a-look-at-berlins-art-scene
Rui Xu smoking story:
http://www.ubspectrum.com/article/2016/07/berlin-bars-still-smoking-despite-bans
Christina Dunn graffiti story:
http://www.ubspectrum.com/article/2016/07/graffiti-painting-city-streets
Christina Dunn memoir:
http://www.ubspectrum.com/article/2016/07/my-mm-meeting-how-a-syrian-boy-named-mohammed-changed-my-life
NAME launch April 2016
The Walter and Miriam Hass Student Excellence Fund
The English Department is delighted to announce a new funding opportunity for English majors, provided by the generous pledged endowment and gift
of Mark Hass (BA, 1975). This fund will be used to support an undergraduate English major in an out-of-classroom experience, with particular attention to
supporting professional development activities that will increase a student’s experience of and exposure to the worlds of business or engineering. Mark
also hopes to encourage students thinking of careers in business or engineering to recognize the value of a major in English and the ways that reading,
writing, and analytical thinking skills contribute to success in many professions. Activities supported by this fund may include internships, conferences, and
research or community-focused projects.
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Graduate Student News
Robert and Carol Morris Dissertation Completion Fellowships
Emily Anderson: “Moving House: New Contexts for Little House on the Prarie”
Jesse Miller: “The Birth of the Literary Clinic: Bibliography and the Aesthetics of Health in the Late Modernist Novel”
CAS Dissertation Completion Fellowships
Eleanor Gold: “Creative Discomforts: Bodies, Trans-Corporality, and Literature in the Anthropocene”
Ana Grujic: “Remembering Bodies, Backward Time: Collective Memory and Erotic Ethics in Black Diasporic Performance”
Ajitpaul Mangat: “Modernism and Cognitive Disability: The Formation of Neurological Difference”
Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies
Alison Fraser: “Cutting Out Poetry: Poetics and Process in American Literature 1865-present”; she was also awarded a
Humanities Institute Fellowship
riverrun Awards
Additional Awards
Shayani Bhattacharya was awarded Mark Diamond Research Funding.
Kristina Marie Darling was awarded grants by the Whiting Foundation and
the Robert and Carol Morris Fellowship Fund. She was a visiting artist at
the American Academy in Rome and at the Whitely Center at the University
of Washington, and she had artist residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center
for the Creative Arts, The Writer’s Room, the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony,
Caldera, and at Playa. She is now Editor-in-Chief of the Tupelo Quarterly.
Josh Flaccavento was awarded the Associated Writing Program’s Intro
Journals Project Award in Poetry for his poem “To delete, press seven” by
judge Philip Metres. His poem will soon appear in the journal Artful Dodge.
A “sneak peak” recording of his poem can be accessed on Artful Dodge’s
Blog at http://artfuldodgewooster.wordpress.com
Jeremy Lakoff was awarded Mark Diamond Research Funding.
Nicole Lowman was elected President of the Kurt Vonnegut Society.
Ajitpaul Mangat was awarded a New York Council for the Humanities grant
for the riverrun Global Film Series (grant co-authored with Tanya ShilinaConte).
Jesse Miller received the New York Council of Humanities, Public Humanities Fellowship.
Adam Drury won a research fellowship for “En/gendering Genres: The Cultural Politics of Experimental Writing in /Savacou: a journal of the Caribbean
Artists Movement/, 1970-1979” (The Caribbean Collection, Sterling Memorial
Library, Yale University)
Jeremy Lakoff won a research fellowship for “Mass Sound Reproduction and
the Anxiety of Audience in Modernist Writing” (archives at Ulster University,
Trinity College, and elsewhere in the UK)
Veronica Wong won a research fellowship for “Muna Lee: Pan Americanism,
Feminism, and the Latin American Literary Field” (Library of Congress and
Columbus Memorial Library). Veronica also won the riverrun Best Syllabus
Prize for a course she will teach on Hip Hop and Literature in the Spring 2017.
A presentation by the riverrun Fellow Awardees will be held on
Thursday, Sept. 22nd, 2016 at 7:00 pm at
Talking Leaves Book Store,
3158 Main Street, Buffalo, NY
It is free and open to the public.
Please come out and congratulate the award winners and learn about
their research and teaching projects.
Leslie Nickerson received a Graduate Student Excellence in Teaching
Award.
Four Students Awarded Opler-Doubrava
Fellowships for 2016-17
Jennifer Dickson
Jeremy Lakoff
Joseph Hall
Veronica Wong
Opler-Doubrava fellowships are awarded on a competitive basis to
PhD candidates in the English Department entering their fifth year who
continue to hold a TAship. The Marilyn Doubrava Endowment was established by Sterling M. and Kathryn L. Doubrava as a memorial to their
daughter. The Opler Scholarship Fund is generously supported by Morris
E. Opler and Lucille R. Opler.
Placement News
Heather Duncan (PhD): Assistant Professor, United International College,
China
Shosuke Kinugawa (PhD): Assistant Professor, Kobe City University of
Foreign Studies, Japan
Prabha Manuratne (PhD): Lecturer, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka
Justin Parks (PhD): University of Norway (Tromso), a tenure-track equivalent appointment
Macy Todd (PhD): Assistant Professor, Buffalo State University
Tina Žigon (PhD): Assistant Professor, American University of Kuwait
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Barry Fallon Memorial International Student Assistance awards went to:
Shayani Bhattacharya, Patricia Chaudron, Jung Suk Hwang, Shosuke
Kinugawa, Min Jin Lee
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Featured Alumnus
Mark Hass (BA, 1975)
In 2013, we wrote in these pages that “Mark
Hass, President and CEO of the public relations
firm Edelman U.S., is a testament to the creativity,
ambition, and hard work of those who pass through
UB’s Department of English.” This continues to be
true. Mark received a BA in English from UB, studied
Journalism as a graduate student at the University
of Maryland, and then worked for sixteen years as a
reporter and editor, a career culminating in 1991, when
his reportorial team won a Pulitzer Prize for disclosing
spending abuses at Michigan’s House Fiscal Agency.
In 1996, he founded the public relations firm Hass Associates, Inc., and began
a second career, eventually overseeing a number of international public relations firms, most recently Edelman U.S. Now, he is again changing careers to
join the faculty at Arizona State University as a professor of practice in the W.
P. Carey School of Business and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and
Communications.
and relevance all are important. I also plan to wear a tie when I teach, out of
respect for my students, something that is not too common in summertime
Arizona.
Do you think that undergraduate English programs should be rethinking curricular offerings to make them more obviously or immediately
relevant to our students’ diverse career goals, or would you encourage
continued promotion of great literature as most relevant to undergraduate students’ success?
Being a full-time college student is a unique time in life. During my years at
UB, I didn’t realize how special it was to have the freedom to read great books,
think and talk about complex ideas, and explore my own changing intellectual
interests without the specific context of career preparation. I miss those days.
It seems there is now more pressure on students to make career decisions
early in their undergraduate days. That’s too bad. Life is long, and getting longer, so I think parents and students should relax about what job will await after
graduation. A well-prepared mind is the reward of a broad liberal arts education. Even as job skills become outdated, a mind well-prepared is an asset that
we carry from job to to job, experience to experience, throughout life.
What do you most look forward to in Act III of your career, in moving
into the field of teaching?
What is your hope for your generous gift to the English Department,
the Walter and Miriam Hass Student Excellence Fund?
Teaching will give me a chance to influence future generations of young
journalists and business professionals. It is a service profession, and I believe
everyone should, at some point in their careers, do work that is mostly about
helping others. I am fortunate at this point in my life to do so. From a more
practical perspective, teaching is also much more sustainable than the career I
recently left. So, I hope to be working in the classroom for a long time.
Miriam and Walter Hass are my deceased mom and dad. They were immigrants from post-World War II Europe who made great personal sacrifices
to get to the U.S. and who dreamed of creating better lives for their kids. The
skills I acquired as an English major at UB, along with unwavering support during college from my parents, made that dream real for me. And now more than
ever before, I believe that an undergraduate experience rooted in reading,
writing, and thinking, in the context of literature and the humanities, is essential to leading a full and rewarding life. This fund is designed to help students
with a passion for English and an interest in the business world achieve their
own version of the American Dream. In some small way, I also hope it allows
the dream my parents had for me and my sisters to become reality for other
young people.
Do you think your experience in courses you enjoyed at UB, such as
“Bible as Literature” with Diane Christian and Shakespeare with Richard
Fly, will influence your teaching at Arizona State?
I am a rookie teacher, and I expect I will unconsciously rely on the lessons
I learned watching the great teachers I’ve known. Subject matter knowledge
is, of course, one important characteristic of an excellent teacher, but I will
think back on the other lessons I’ve learned from teachers such as Diane and
Richard. Passion, presence, a genuine interest in students, a sense of humor
Alumni/ae News
Mindy Aloff (MA, 1972) ABD, Woodburn Fellow ‘73-’74, has been appointed
as an editor-at-large for books on dancing at the University Press of Florida.
Since 2000, she has taught dance history and essay writing as an adjunct at
Barnard; in addition, she now teaches first-year students at the CUNY Macaulay Honors College. Her book-in-progress, Why Dance Matters, was commissioned for Yale University Press’s “Why X Matters” series.
Sarah Brennan (BA, 1999) has recently published two (collaborative) articles:
Rodriguez, N. N., Brennan, S., Varelas, A., Hutchins, C., DiSanto, J. “Center for
teaching and learning on tour: Sharing, reflecting, and documenting effective
strategies,” Journal on Centers for Teaching and Learning 7 (2015); Nunez Rodriguez N, DiSanto J, Morales A, Feliz I, Brennan S. “Inter-visitation: Innovative
Strategies that Meet the Needs of A Diverse Student Body,” Global Academic
Review (2014) 2.4; a third co-authored article is in press.
Eugenie Brinkema (MA, 2004) was awarded honorable mention in the MLA
First-Book award for The Forms of the Affect (Duke University Press); the prize
is awarded for an outstanding scholarly work published in 2014.
Mary Cappello (PhD, 1988) Professor of English and Creative Writing at the
University of Rhode Island, won a Berlin Prize, fall 2015. She also won the
2015 URI Foundation Scholarly Excellence Award. Her fifth book is forthcoming this October 2016, Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack (University of Chicago
Press). An excerpt, “Mood Rooms,” will appear this Fall as the annual Meridel
LeSueur Essay in Water~Stone Review. Mary has also published: “Lyric Essay
as Perversion: Channeling Djuna Barnes” (TriQuarterly on-line), and a conversation with poet, editor and translator, Peter Covino, on anti-beauty, un-beauty,
disruptive beauty, and uncontained beauty in poetry (The Conversant, November 2014). She contributed to a series on creative nonfiction as a queer genre
in Slag Glass City. www.marycappello.com
Donald Carampa (BA, MCL, 1974) was, he supposes, an atypical UB graduate: he transferred from University of Michigan, spent considerable time in
France, and received a double major in English and French. While learning
French, he also learned to juggle and took mime classes, leading to his career
as a juggler, magician, and clown (for about 40 years), specialized in street
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performing (passing the hat). He is not very enthusiastic about listing his own
achievements, but believes they might make an interesting story for other alums. He has authored a book (in Spain), published numerous essays in the
U.S., France, Spain, Croatia, and Brazil, lectured at Harvard, translated six
books by notable authors into English, exercised his profession on five continents (most recently in Iraqi Kurdistan), curated museum activities, and been
photographed for Elle magazine. Donald founded and directs a circus school,
the Premio Nacional de Circo, in Madrid (www.carampa.com), which was
distinguished with the National Prize, Spain’s highest recognition, and he is
president of the European based federation (FEDEC, www.fedec.eu), which
unites the principle institutions in circus/street performance around the world.
There is now a major in this field at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, the first
BA in Circus Arts in Spain. Despite the fact that he never had to use his degree
for anything he does, he uses the skills that he gathered as an English major
at UB every day, especially in communicating internationally in a field that is
cosmopolitan by nature.
Nancy Cook (PhD, 1991) was promoted to Professor of English at the University of Montana in 2015. She has taught as an exchange faculty member at
the University of Toulouse and continues both to present her work at academic
conferences in Europe and the U.S., and to publish in the fields of place studies
and ecocritisim.
Eric Cortellessa (BA, 2013) is a Washington, D.C. reporter with the Times
of Israel and freelance journalist and essayist with recent publications in The
Huffington Post and Newsweek. Before moving to D.C., he spent four months
reporting from Jerusalem. In 2015, he received an MA from Medill School of
Journalism, Northwestern University, where his thesis project—a documentary
on criminal records as a barrier to employment—was nominated for a College Emmy Award. While at Northwestern, he was involved with the Social
Justice News Nexus, the National Security Journalism Initiative, and travelled
to Pakistan, where he wrote a series of articles for Newsweek Pakistan on
U.S.-Pakistani immigrant issues and Pakistan’s death penalty, particularly the
country’s practice of executing inmates for crimes committed as minors.
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Alumni/ae News
Amy Hezel (BA, 2000) is the ILS & E-Resource Librarian and Assistant Professor in the Dayton Memorial Library at Regis University, Denver, CO.
Bruce Holsapple (PhD, 1991) will publish The Birth of the Imagination: William
Carlos Williams on Form with the University of New Mexico Press, Nov. 2016.
Sibyl James (PhD, 1978) has received three Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowships, which led to teaching positions in Tunis, Tunisia, and Cote d’Ivoire.
She has also taught at colleges in the U.S., China, and Mexico and received
awards from Artist Trust, from Seattle, King County, and Washington State Arts
Commissions, and from several literary journals. She recently read from her
new collection of poems, The Grand Piano Range. The “range” of poems in
this volume is political, personal, and geographic. James is interested in Pacific
Northwest back roads, small towns, and good bars where a barmaid “shares
Wild Turkey on the house” and a neighbor takes your shift the night your baby’s
born. She is the author of 11 books—poetry, fiction, and travel memoirs—including In China with Harpo and Karl, The Adventures of Stout Mama, and
China Beats.
Rick Jetter (BA, 1996; PhD, English Education, 2010) has published three
books in three genres since January 2016: Sutures of the Mind is a self-improvement/Christian-living book that activates the art and science of mindfulness for dealing with pain (Motivational Press); Hiring the Best Staff for Your
School is an academic book that uses narrative theory as a tool for hiring educators (Routledge); and The Isolate /n./ is a young adult novel about an autistic
student who suffers from agoraphobia (Twilight Times Books). Rick is currently
writing another book in each of these genres.
Sean J. Kelly (PhD, 2008), Associate Professor of English at Wilkes University,
teaches courses in nineteenth-century American literature, African American
literature, the American novel, and composition. His recent articles include
“‘Hawthorne’s ‘Material Ghosts’: Photographic Realism and Liminal Selfhood
in The House of the Seven Gables,” Papers on Language and Literature 47.3
(2011); “American Idle: Washington Irving, Authorship, and the Echoes of Native American Myth in ‘Rip Van Winkle,’” Short Story 19.1 (2011); and 2 essays
in The Edgar Allan Poe Review: “‘I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity’: Penning Perversion in Poe’s ‘The Black Cat,’” 13.2 (2012); and
“Staging Nothing: the Figure of Das Ding in Poe’s ‘The Raven,’” (forthcoming,
2016). He is also faculty advisor for The Manuscript, an award-winning student
publication of creative writing and the visual arts.
John M. Krafft (PhD, 1978) co-founded the (now defunct) journal Pynchon
Notes and co-edited it for thirty years. For more than a decade he has been
collaborating with Luc Herman (University of Antwerp) on a series of essays
they hope to turn into a book of genetic criticism of Pynchon’s first novel, V. He
taught at the University of Köln in 2002 and 2011 and at the Catholic University
of Lublin from 2012 to 2014. He was widowed in 2009 and will retire from Miami
University in 2017. [email protected]
Kevin Kurtz (BA, 1993) has published a nonfiction children’s picture eBook,
Where Wild Microbes Grow (2015), that introduces kids to the scientific search
for life under the seafloor. It was funded through a National Science Foundation grant and written for the Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations;
it is available in both PDF and interactive iBook formats for Macs and iPads.
The iBook version contains videos, photographs, and other media. This book
is a companion to Uncovering Earth’s Secrets, about the JOIDES Resolution,
which Kevin also wrote, http://joidesresolution.org/node/2998.
Jenna Lay (BA, 2002) has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure
in the English department at Lehigh University and published her first book,
Beyond the Cloister: Catholic Englishwomen and Early Modern Literary Culture
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
Meron Langsner (BA, English & Theatre 1996) earned MA degrees from NYU
and Brandeis and a PhD in Drama from Tufts University (2011). He was one
of three writers selected for the pilot year of the National New Play Network
Emerging Playwright Residencies. His plays have been performed around the
U.S. and overseas and published by imprints including Bloomsbury, Smith &
Kraus, and Applause. His scholarship has been published by McFarland, Oxford, and other presses. Meron is also a critically acclaimed theatrical fight
choreographer, on the Core Faculty of the Tom Toderoff Acting Conservatory.
In his parallel life, he works with the NY firm Cooper & Cooper Real Estate.
www.MeronLangsner.com
Annette Magid (PhD, 1992) has published Apocalyptic Projections: A Study
of Past Predictions, Current Trends and Future Intimations as Related to Film
and Literature (Cambridge Scholars, 2015). The book cover was adapted from
Precambrian Midnight, a painting by her son, Jonathan Magid.
Aaron Mansfield (BA, 2014) works as Account Manager at SportsMEDIA
Technology in Durham, NC, where he oversees the relationships between his
company and clients such as Turner Sports, MSG Network, Pac-12 Networks,
and NFL Network. His company helps produce the Olympics, Super Bowl, and
other major sporting events. He is also a regular contributor to Complex Magazine. After graduating from UB, Aaron earned an MS in Sport Management at
UMass Amherst and served as an assistant men’s basketball coach at Amherst
College.
Eric Culver (BA, 2014) will soon finish an MS in Sports Management/Athletic
Administration at Southern New Hampshire University. He is now an intern
in the SUNY New Paltz Athletic Department, working with NCAA compliance,
student-athlete development, Academic Support, department budgeting, Summer Camp administration (event management), and the Student Athlete Advisory Committee. This fall, he will apply for an internship with the NCAA, in part
to learn more about compliance and the championship department.
Jack D’Amico (PhD, 1964), now retired from Canisius College, divides his
time between Berkeley, CA and Buffalo. Recent publications: “Rehearsing Leander: Byron and Swimming in the Long Eighteenth Century” in British Sporting Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Sharon Harrow
(Ashgate, 2015) and “The Role of Theatricality in Andrea Camilleri’s Crime Fiction,” Rivista di Studi Italiani 33 (2016).
Kristin Dykstra (PhD, 2002; MA, 1988) has translated contemporary Cuban
poet Juan Carlos Flores’s The Counterpunch (and Other Horizontal Poems)
(University of Alabama Press, 2016 - Forthcoming from Alabama in 2016 are
her translations of books by Angel Escobar and Marcelo Morales. In 2015 she
wrote the commentary series “Intermedium,” with a focus on translation, for
Jacket2. In 2012 she won an NEA for Literature Translation.
Karen L. Eichler (BA, 1994; MA, 1997) is a member of the two-person improvisational comedy group Defiant Monkey Improv. She and her partner Andy
perform shows and teach workshops for children, adults, and corporations, as
Teaching Artists with Young Audiences of Western New York and Rochester.
Defiant Monkey Improv now has a full-length comedy show and runs an open
“Improv Jam” once a month at the Kenan Center’s Taylor Theater in Lockport.
Karen uses her degrees from UB to teach public speaking at Niagara University
and writing at Empire State College. If you see the “2 Person 1 Man Band,”
“Space Girl and Rinaldo the Robot,” or “Hertie Gertie’s Monkey Mayhem Show
starring Lola, the Lowland Gorilla” performing on the street, tip them generously! One of them was an English major at UB. [email protected]
Alan Feldman (PhD 1973), retired professor and chair of the English Department at Framingham (MA) State University, now gives free, drop-in poetrywriting workshops at the library in Framingham, where he lives, and in Wellfleet
on Cape Cod, during the summer. These workshops have inspired, in part,
his most recent collection, Immortality (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015)
and some of his recent work in Southern Review, Salamander, upstreet, Harvard Review, Antigonish Review, Cimarron Review, and work featured in Best
American Poetry 2011, Poetry Daily, Writers Almanac, and Common Threads.
Nina Garfinkel (BA, English and Psychology, 1976) is a frequent contributor to
Book/Mark: A Quarterly Review of Small Press Publications.
Bernadette Gargano (BA, 1999) was appointed as Vice Dean of Student Affairs at UB Law School in 2016. She received the 2016 graduating class’s “Faculty Award,” the only teaching award at the Law School, and her Pro Se Civil
Litigation Practicum, which provides legal services to underrepresented communities, was a finalist for UB’s Excellence in Community Engagement award.
Bernadette received the NY Erie County Bar Association “Justice Award” for
this same program. She was also honored as the 2015 Woman Lawyer of the
Year by Women Lawyers of Western New York, the area’s oldest organization
for women lawyers.
Michelle Gaskin (BA, English, Art, 2015) is working on her Masters in TESOL
set to graduate May 2017. Currently in Crete, volunteering on the Gournia project, she is learning about Minoan wall and floor plasters under archaeologist,
Anne Chapin.
Brian Gastle (BA, 1989) has returned to teaching in the English Department
at Western Carolina University after holding positions at WCU as Department
Head, Associate Dean of the Graduate School, and Interim Associate Provost.
He serves as webmaster for the John Gower Society (www.johngower.org) and
recently secured permission from the British Library to host an open-access online digital copy of the Trentham Manuscript, which was owned by John Gower,
a medieval poet (and friend of Chaucer), and possibly composed partially in
his own hand—a rare example of medieval English literary material production.
Evan Gottlieb (MA, 2000; PhD, 2002) has been promoted to Professor of English in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State University. His
latest book, Romantic Realities: Speculative Realism and British Romanticism,
is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press, September 2016.
Brian Herberger (BA, 1995) recently published his first novel, Miss E. An
educator for over twenty years and father of two middle-school-aged children,
Brian is immersed in the world of young adult fiction. Miss E. draws from Brian’s
childhood memories and love of history. It is told from the perspective of an independent-minded 15-year-old, whose father leaves for the war in Vietnam and
whose history teacher gives an assignment that has the whole school searching for clues. When a peaceful protest spins out of control, Bets reconsiders
how she feels about the war her father is fighting and her own role in events
at home. UB alum Michael Gelen’s Inkwell Studios designed the book cover.
http://www.brianherberger.com/
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ences and serving on several boards of directors to help create change in these
areas. She would love to work with others who are similarly motivated to create
a world that is safe and just.
Karen Swallow Prior (PhD, 1999) is writing a book modeling the exercise of
virtue through the reading of classic works of literature (Brazos Press, 2018).
She is Professor of English at Liberty University, where she received the Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence in 2013, was named Faculty of the Year
by the Multicultural Enrichment Center in 2010, and was the 2003 recipient of
the President’s Award for Teaching Excellence. Her books include Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More, Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist,
and Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me.
Gary Earl Ross (BA, 1973; MA, 1975) received the 2016 Emanuel Fried Outstanding New Play Award from Arties for The Mark of Cain, staged by the Subversive Theatre Collective in Buffalo. Cain will have a staged reading at NYC’s
Castillo Theater in August. Gary’s novel Nickel City Blues, the first Gideon
Rimes mystery, is forthcoming with Black Opal Books. He is at work on both a
new play and the next novel in his PI series.
Rebecca Sanchez (PhD, 2010) published her first book, Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature (NYU
Press, 2015).
Ronnie (Selk) Schwartz (BA, 1976; EdM, 1977) and her UB-graduate husband Raymond Schwartz retired last year and welcomed their first grandchild,
Hayley Isabel Schwartz. They have been traveling and catching up with old
friends. They recently returned from a river cruise in the south of France, where
they celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary.
Carol Senf (PhD, 1979) has stepped down as Associate Chair and is back to
teaching in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia
Institute of Technology. She has recently published: “Bram Stoker’s Reflections
on the American Character,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 59.3
(2016); “Bram Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm: Supernatural Representations and Nineteenth-Century Paleontology,” Supernatural in the Nineteenth
Century 2 (2015); “Invasions Real and Imagined: Stoker’s Gothic Narratives,”
Bram Stoker and the Gothic: Formations to Transformations, ed. Catherine
Wynne (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); and “Bram Stoker,” Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature (2016). During a recent trip to Philadelphia, where
she served as a consultant on Stoker for the Rosenbach Museum, she met with
fellow UB alumna, Doreen Saar, who now teaches at Drexel University. carol.
[email protected]
Aimee M. Woznick (BA, 2005) earned her MA & PhD (2010) in English at
UC Santa Barbara, with a focus on U.S. literature in the late 19th & early 20th
centuries. She then chose to work in administration, first as Director of the
Academic Success Center at Villa Maria College (a small, mostly commuter
Catholic college on the east side of Buffalo), then as Director of Academic
Support Services at SUNY Empire State College, where she oversees tutoring
services and other academic support programming for five college locations in
WNY. She holds concurrent academic rank and frequently teaches in her field,
enjoying a “best of both worlds” position!
George Zornick (BA, 2005) is the Washington Editor at The Nation. Prior to
joining The Nation, George was Senior Reporter/Blogger for ThinkProgress.
org. He worked as a researcher for Michael Moore’s SiCKO and as an Associate Producer on “The Media Project” on the Independent Film Channel. His
work has been published in The Los Angeles Times, Media Matters, and The
Buffalo News.
David Marion (BA, English & Political Science, 1976) works at Uptown Communications Consultants, which has just completed its third project for the
United Nations in three years. Most recently, they provided writing and design
services for the revision of an enterprise system user manual to support the
system upgrade for the UN International Computing Centre. Work product included new module documentation, revision of existing modules, creation of
online wiki content, training presentations, and workflow cheat sheets for users.
[email protected]
Anne McGrail (PhD, 1998) was awarded two NEH Office of Digital Humanities
grants for bringing digital humanities to community colleges. Her article “The
Whole Game: Digital Humanities at Community Colleges” was published in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, eds. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren Klein
(University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
Kevin McShane (BA, 2015) received his degree 44 years after he was supposed to get it! He did his undergrad work during the era of such luminaries as
John Barth and Robert Creeley.
Deborah Meadows (BA, 1977) teaches as Emerita faculty in the Liberal
Studies Department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. She
recently published Translation, the bass accompaniment: Selected Poems
(Shearsman Press, 2013) and Three Plays (BlazeVox Books, 2015), and her
play “Some Cars” was produced in LA’s MorYork Gallery, 2015. She was nominated Los Angeles Poet Laureate in 2014. She lives with her husband in the
LA Arts District/Little Tokyo, where she serves on the board of the Los Angeles
River Artists’ and Business Association.
Paige Melon (BA, English & French, 2013) published her first book of poetry,
Puddles of an Open (BlazeVOX) and a chapbook, MTL/BFL//ÉTÉ/QUINZE,
(Buffalo Ochre Papers). Paige was the Keynote Speaker at this summer’s
Poet’s Camp organized by Plur·al·ity Press. In May she obtained her MA in
English from the University of Maine, where she worked with poet Jennifer
Moxley on her thesis, a translation of a novel by Chinese-Canadian author
Ying Chen. Paige works as Education Coordinator for Explore Buffalo® and
runs steel bellow: a purely Buffalo literary magazine, which she founded in
2012 with her partner, fellow UB alum Vincent Cervone. Paige and Vincent will
be married in November 2017 at Rust Belt Books, where they met at a poetry
reading. [email protected]
Lois Merriweather Moore (BA, 1969) attended Harvard University’s John F.
Kennedy School of Government, 2016 Women & Power: Leadership in a New
World Summit at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.
The business and leadership sessions were highlighted by two seminars: Centered Leadership: How Talented Women Thrive and Diversity, Inclusive Leadership, and Unconscious Bias. Summit participants also enjoyed an interactive
experience at Queensland University of Technology Cube (one of the world’s
largest digital interactive learning spaces) and observed international research
being conducted on drought tolerant, disease resistant chickpeas. The second
half of the Leadership Summit took place in Sydney and included a session at
New South Wales Parliament House, a visit to the Australia Zoo, an excursion
to Cockatoo Island, a tour of the Sydney Opera House, and lunch overlooking
the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The Leadership Summit is an annual event attracting women from countries around the world. This year’s Summit participants
included women from Afghanistan, Australia, Tanzania, New Zealand, and the
United States. [email protected]
Rae L. Muhlstock (PhD, 2014) is a Lecturer in the Writing and Critical Inquiry
Department at SUNY Albany. She was also accepted into the Project Narrative
Summer Institute (for the second time), a competitive international seminar in
narrative theory at Ohio State University. In addition, UB students elected her
as one of two honorary faculty initiates into the Golden Key International Honors Society, UB chapter.
Josh Newman (BA, 2011; MA, 2013) begins his studies at Trinity College
Dublin this fall to earn a PhD in English, studying the works of James Joyce,
especially Finnegans Wake, in relation to eco-criticism and the politics of place.
Clare Paniccia (BA, 2012) received a MA in Professional Writing from Southeast Missouri State University (2015) and is pursuing her PhD in English at
Oklahoma State University. In 2015 she was named one of the nation’s best
new poets by Pulitzer prize winning poet Tracy K. Smith and in 2016 she was a
finalist for the Indiana Review, Nimrod, and Sonora Review Poetry Prizes; her
poetry is featured or forthcoming in The Pinch, Superstition Review, Sonora
Review, Zone 3, Nimrod, Puerto del Sol, and Best New Poets. Her research interests include poetics, creative writing pedagogy, and the intersection of these
two fields. This fall, she will begin managing the PR/social media presence for
Cimarron Review. [email protected]
Remla Parthasarthy (BA, English, 1989; JD, 1994) is back in the area working
as Project Leader, Crime Victims’ Legal Network at the Empire Justice Center.
She hopes to provide transformative experiences for her students and ignite
their passion for social justice activism. Her particular areas of focus are intimate partner violence, violence against women, and helping others understand
the lives of targets of abuse. For over 20 years, she has worked as an advocate, attorney, educator, leader, and collaborator, presenting at major conferDepartment of English/2016-17
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What can YOU do with an English major?
If you’re Matt DelPiano (BA, 1991) you can become an agent representing
actors like Kevin Spacey, two-time Academy-award winner, former Artistic
Director of Britian’s Old Vic Theatre, and now Frank Underwood, the ruthless Presidential politician in the hit Netflix original series House of Cards
UB Alumni Matt DelPiano speaks with English students in Clemens Hall.
Photograph: Douglas Levere
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Emeriti
Irving Massey, Professor Emeritus, was appointed Visiting Fellow at
Cambridge for the spring term of 2017. He was a co-author of an experiment
mentioned in an article in The Atlantic, written by Valdas Noreika. http://www.
theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/deciphering-hypnagogia/478941/
Modernism,” and invited to Mizoram University in India as a Visiting Professor.
His most recent short story, “Library of the Lost,” came out in Bryant Literary
Review 17 (2016). It is set in a department and university not unlike UB. He
will be teaching two mini-courses in the Honors College in the fall -- his 50th
year of teaching at UB.
Howard Wolf, Professor Emeritus, was featured at an event in November at
The University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for German & European Studies,
giving a lecture entitlled “Goethe to Grass and Beyond: Responsibilities of the
Writer in the Postware Period”. He was also invited to lecture at the University
of Aveiro (Portugal) on “Fitzgerald and Hemingway: The Legacy of American
Max Wickert, Professor Emeritus, recently completed a verse translation of
Torquato Tasso’s Italian Renaissance epic, Rinaldo. It will be published by
Italica Press in a bilingual edition in early 2017.
In Memoriam
Dennis Tedlock by Steve McCaffery, UB English Professor, David Gray Chair of Poetry and Letters
July 19, 1939 – June 3, 2016
SUNY Distinguished Professor and James H. McNulty Professor in English, Dennis Tedlock, was a trained linguist, ethnographer, poet, translator, and photographer. Dennis was raised in Albuquerque and Taos and developed as a boy a passion for archaeology. He studied under the Cochiti artist Joe Herrera and
joined an archaeological dig while still in high school. He studied history and anthropology at the University of New Mexico and pursued doctoral studies in the
art of story telling among the Zunis archeology at Tulane. Dennis’s field research was carried out with his wife Barbara and together they worked in Mexico,
Brazil, Nigeria, Mongolia, and most repeatedly among the Mayan peoples in Guatemala and Belize. He was founding editor of Alcheringa the influential journal of
ethnopoetics (a discipline he co-conceived with Jerome Rothenberg in the late 1960s). Since 1987 he was the McNulty Professor in English and held a research
professorship in anthropology at UB, co-founding in 1991 (with Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, Raymond Federman, and Susan Howe) the UB Poetics Program and remaining a Core member of its faculty until his death. Dennis was an ardent donor of material to UB Libraries Poetry and Rare Books including several
letters from D. H. Lawrence. Among his many publications are a definitive translation of the Popul Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life; Finding the Center:
Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians, and most recently the magisterial The Human Work, The Human Design: 2000 Years of Mayan Literature. He passed away at
his home near Taos, New Mexico sixteen days before his 78th birthday, in the house whose former residents include Frieda and D. H. Lawrence. A memorial will
be held in Clemens 306 on September 17th at 11:00am. Dennis is survived by his widow, Barbara Tedlock.
Xliktech uutsil to Xibalba Dennis.
George Levine (from the UB Reporter, Dec. 17, 2015)
August 5, 1929 – December 16, 2015
George R. Levine, a Fulbright scholar and highly respected UB English professor who served in various administrative positions, including provost of the Faculty
of Arts and Letters, as part of a career spanning more than four decades in higher education, died December 16, 2015 at Buffalo General Hospital following a brief
illness. He was 86.
Levine, a native of Boston, Massachusetts, joined the UB faculty from Northwestern University in 1963. He retired in 2001. “He never forgot a student’s name,”
said Rivona Ehrenreich, Levine’s widow. “There were many things he loved about the university, but his students always came first.”
A 1951 graduate of Tufts University, Levine earned an MA from Columbia University the following year. From 1952-54, he served as a member of the U.S. Army
Signal Corps in Korea. He resumed his studies at Columbia following his military discharge and received a PhD in 1962.
“George was a valued colleague and a real gent --beloved by students and department staff, too, for his kindness and decency,” said James Holstun, UB professor of English. In addition to his teaching responsibilities, Levine assumed a leadership role in the English Department when he was named director of undergraduate studies in 1967. He became associate provost of the Faculty of Arts and Letters in 1971 and later its provost in 1975, serving in that capacity until 1981.
After 1981, Ehrenreich said Levine was thrilled to be back in the classroom, a place where he often formed lasting relationships with many of this students, advising them on matters of academics and later in matters of life. “If George met a former student he hadn’t seen in twenty years, he would pick up the conversation
as though no time had gone by at all,” said Ehrenreich. He also played a role as an administrative link to students holding campus demonstrations as a member of
then-president Martin Meyerson’s Committee on Student Demands. “He was a gentle man who didn’t like the discord,” said Ehrenreich. “It was a very difficult time.”
Levine, who helped develop an innovative method of teaching lyric poetry, won a Fulbright Lecturing award in 1969 that took him to the University of Cologne in
Germany, where he lectured in the literature of the Restoration and the 18th century, his academic specialty.
He spoke often of the strong relationship between literature and the arts, and was the author of Henry Fielding and the Dry Mock: A Study of the Techniques of
Irony in his Early Works. He also co-wrote two textbooks; edited and completed Willard Hallam Bonner’s Harp on the Shore: Thoreau and the Sea; and authored
several scholarly articles.
An accomplished violinist, Levine played with many non-professional groups and served on the boards of the Buffalo Chamber Music Society; The Buffalo Youth
Orchestra Foundation, and The Arts Education Council. He was an elected officer of the Arts in Education Institute.
Levine is survived by his widow and by children David (Maggie) and Michael (Karen) Levine; a grandchildren Allyson, Alexandra, William, Jacob and Julia; and a
sister, Thelma (Robert) Kirby.
Bill Sylvester by Mike Basinski, UB Curator, University LIbraries - VPUL
July 1, 1918 – June 12, 2016
William A. Sylvester was Professor Emeritus in the Department of English. A native of Washington, D.C., Sylvester received an MA in English from the University
of Chicago and a PhD in English from the University of Minnesota. He arrived in Buffalo from Case-Western Reserve University as the English Department
expanded rapidly under Al Cook in the 1960s, and he was on the UB English Department Faculty for 23 years, retiring in 1988. Always a lover of music, from the
Beatles to Lawrence Welk to the music experiments of the 1970s, Bill was also a great friend of poetry and a poet. He published seven poetry collections and was
an active citizen in Buffalo’s literary community. Bill would bicycle onto campus in his yellow rain jacket and pants. He was full of spirt and a natural, challenging
teacher. For the beatnik faction in a course he taught on Hemingway and/or the Beats (Hemingway on Tuesday – Beats on Thursday), he posed this as the final
exam question: “Answer Kerouac’s question at the end of On the Road: God is Pooh-Bear?” Within the company of Buffalo poets, former students, and faculty and
community friends, he is sorely missed. A memorial event will take place this fall at the Poetry Collection, 420 Capen Hall.
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In Memoriam
Mark Shechner (1940-2015) by Andrew M. Gordon
I have lost a good friend; American literature has lost a major critic. Mark Shechner (1940-2015), Professor Emeritus of English at the University at Buffalo, was
one of the most distinguished and influential critics of Jewish-American literature of his time, a sharp observer of cultural politics: as he wrote, “It is sometimes
hard to tell the Jewish literary scene from gang war-fare” (After the Revolution 3). He kept up with the changing scene as a writer and editor, as well as a frequent
participant in the annual symposium on Jewish-American and Holocaust literature and at recent Philip Roth conferences in Venice and in Newark. Since 2007, he
was a judge of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, presented annually to a young writer whose fiction is considered to have significance to the American Jew.
All his writing was lucid, consistently perceptive, sometimes brilliant, and informed by reading both deep and wide. But what made his criticism especially
engaging was his effusive wit and lively style. He was constitutionally incapable of writing a dull or impenetrable sentence. And he possessed a fine sense of
chutzpah: what other scholar would dare entitle a book about the fiction of Philip Roth Up Society¹s Ass, Copper? But it was a fitting title for a study of Roth the
provocateur; Mark was quoting from the end of Portnoy’s Complaint.
Mark was also a mensch of the first order, always generous with his time and assistance to fellow scholars, myself included. We met in graduate school at
Berkeley; he was my friend and colleague for almost fifty years.
Under the tutelage of Professor Frederick Crews, he began as a psycho-analytic critic but evolved into a cultural critic. With his accessible, witty style and his
widespread pattern of publication, Mark aspired to be a Jewish-American public intellectual along the lines of Alfred Kazin or Irving Howe. He started his career as
a Joycean, and his first book was Joyce in Nighttown: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry into Ulysses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974). But his major lifelong
devotion was to Jewish-American literature. Starting in the 1970s, his essays and reviews appeared in journals such as Partisan Review, The Nation, Salmagundi,
Tikkun and many anthologies and collections. He was also a prolific book reviewer for The Buffalo News.
In addition to three books and three edited or co-edited collections on Jewish-American literature, in 2014 Mark published his first novel, Call Me Moishe: The
True Confessions of a White Whale: Melville’s Moby Dick, retold by the whale, as channeled through Morris (Moishe) Dickens, Professor of English at the “University of Snowport” in upstate New York. Lovers of Melville or of Buffalo, NY will find a lot to laugh about in the book. Although he got a late start as a novelist, Mark
was a gifted raconteur. His last book, Cherry Picker, based on his gambling career, is forthcoming.
….
In the end, Mark compares Philip Roth to Mailer and Ginsberg as literary rebels who expanded the territory of American literature by writing about sex and rage,
and by provoking authority: “They are problems; they stir things up. They did all they could to be singled out, to be difficult and cause distress, and though they did
it for themselves, they posted gains for others, and American literature owes them all a debt of gratitude” (219).
Up Society’s Ass, Copper, indeed! Mark Shechner helped to expand the territory of American literary criticism. He moved beyond the academic jargons of the
day and always responded to literature with honesty, with energy; with learning, wit, and style. For forty years, he was one of our best barometers of the works of
Philip Roth and other Jewish-American writers. He reacted with all he had, with his mind and his memory, as well as his eyes, his ears, and his heart. Mark says
that the patrimony Philip Roth received from his father Herman was “nothing less than his own character: his humor, his stories, his own iron will, vernacular heart,
and toughness of mind” (130). The same could be said of Mark Shechner as a critic of Roth and of American literature. And for that we owe him an enormous debt
of gratitude.
Except from Philip Roth Studies, 12.1 (Spring 2016), 5 - which honors the significance of Mark’s publications in Jewish American literature; quoted courtesy of
Purdue University Press.
On Mark Shechner by Neil Schmitz, UB Professor Emeritus
June 22, 1940 - October 16, 2015
Mark had the genial Jewish humor we abject sour Gentiles dumbly envy, and it was drawn from a vault not too far from the Temple
of Singer. Effortless flow, in dialect, superb mimicry. He could have been a staff writer for Mel Brooks, just as Howard Wolf, who sits
among us, also a funny guy, could have been a staff writer for Jack Benny. We have been blessed to have such company in our English
department. Here, too, the king of our comedy, Carl Edward Dennis, sits modestly among us.
1. Somewhere between 2005 and 2010 I continuously taught a course on blackface minstrelsy and just when I thought I knew
everything, Mark introduced me to Vaudeville’s jewface, a short lived tradition in the genre of novelty act. He had the actual voices and
music: Monroe Silver; The Heavenly Hebe; Rhoda Bernard, That Zany Zaftig Meidele. She sings: “Cohen owes me 97 dollars,” an
Irving Berlin song. Mark’s music vault was as deep as the story vault.
2. He owned Philip Roth in the English department. Mark was born and raised in Roth’s New Jersey. He was a citizen in Roth’s world,
a native speaker.
3. He also lived in other worlds. He was cosmopolitan. He was a figure in the literary world of James Joyce. And he knew Japan. He enjoyed its culture, if one
can say that; while living in Japan, he learned its ways and manners, if not language, and came back dedicated to its cuisine.
4. He also knew the world of American and Canadian casinos. He played the games. He learned the lexicon, ate the food, dug the electric ambiance. Mark’s
account of his casino life is very French, existentialist; it engages the issue of being there before a slot machine, and it does semiology, classifies the colors, the
smells, the noise. It is a tour de force, one of his best things, and it has been posthumously published as Cherry Picker.
5. Finally, his summa, Call Me Moishe, The True Confessions of a White Whale. A marvelous comic device, a Jewish white whale, but alas the mortals pursuing
are long-ago critic dragons and professor villains; the text needs much footnoting, so finally it does not carry the day. Nearly everyone attending Mark’s memorial
gathering is in Call Me Moishe, captured in some instance of foolery.
6. I am not, I am somewhat sad to say, in the novel, and I still don’t know how to take my exception. Mark liked me. I know this, but I think he also thought I was
hopelessly Midwestern, a rube, a square, an innocent, and therefore not a fit figure for his gallery of departmental rogues and charlatans. Well, I accept my fate.
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Upcoming Events .....
THE BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS SERIES 32/FALL 2016
DATE:
Sept. 15 - 5:00-6:30pm - Open House for Poetics Program Library - 410 Clemens Hall
Sept. 15 - 7:00-8:30pm - Andy Stott documentary on stand-up comics in Buffalo. “Cold
Snow Losers: Open Mic at the Edge of America” (screening) - 120 Clemens
Sept. 29 - October 1 - riverrun Global Film Festival (see p. 5)
Sept. 26 - 12:30pm - Anna Kornbluh (U of Illinois, Chicago) - Center for the Study of
Psychanalysis & Culture - 638 Clemens
Sept.30 - 8:00pm - Poetics Plus Reading, Aja Couchois Duncan
Oct. 6 - 4:00pm - Elissa Marder (Emory Univ), lecture on “Fixation: Freud’s CounterConcept” - 1032 Clemens
Oct. 10 - 7:00pm - Exhibit X presents Can Xue - WNYBAC
Oct. 13 - 5-7:00pm - Shakespeare Jubilee, B&EC Public Library
Oct. 13-14: “Object & Adaptation; The Worlds of Shakespeare’s Cervantes,” UB Center
for the Arts (see p. 5)
Oct. 18 - 12:00-1:30pm - Jang Wook Huh - “Color Around the Globe: Langston Hughes
and Comparative Racialization”
- 830 Clemens
Nov. 3 - 7:00pm - Exhibit X presents Amelia Gray @ WNYBAC
Nov. 11 - 4:00pm - Ruth Mack, “Captain Cook’s Tools for Ethnography” - Hallwalls
Nov. 11 - 8:00pm - Campbell McGrath - Oscar Silverman Reading - 672 Delaware Ave.
(Butler Mansion)
SPRING SEMESTER:
Mar. 30, 2017 - 2:00-5:00pm - Creeley Lecture & Celebration of Poetry - lecture by
Jerome McGann, “Reading Poetry”
Apr. 21, 2017 - 2:00-6:00pm & Apr. 22 - 8:00am-10:00pm - Community Marathon
Reading of Emily Dickinson’s poetry - 8:00am-10:00pm at Westminster Presbyterian Church, 724 Delaware Ave., Buffalo, NY
Check out our website for more information on Upcoming Events:
http://www.buffalo.edu/cas/english/news-events/upcoming_events.html
To sign up for the alumni listserv, please email
Sophia Canavos at [email protected]
16
Dipson Amherst Theatre, 3500 Main Street, Buffalo, NY
Tuesdays at 7:00pm
Sept. 6 - Sam Wood, A Night at the Opera, 1935
Sept. 13 - Jean Cocteau, Beauty and the Beast, 1946
Sept. 20 - Jacues Tourneur, Out of the Past, 1947
Sept. 27 - Yasujiro Ozu, Late Spring, 1949
Oct. 4 - Joseph L. Mankiewicz, All About Eve, 1950
Oct. 11 - Federico Fellini, La Dolce Vita, 1960
Oct. 18 - Orson Welles, Chimes at Midnight, 1966
Oct. 25 - Sarah Elder and Leonard Kamerling, The Drums of Winter,
1977
Nov. 1 - Hall Ashby, Being There, 1979
Nov. 8 - Brian De Palma, The Untouchables, 1987
Nov. 15 - Norman Jewison, Moonstruck, 1987
Nov. 22 - Andrei Tarkovsky, The Sacrifice, 1986
Nov. 29 - Alfonso Arau, Like Water for Chocolate, 1992
Dec. 6 - Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, The Tourist, 2010
Further information at: http://buffalofilmseminars.com
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To submit information or to contact us:
[email protected]